THE NEW YORKER than a colonialist, and advocated na- tionalization, he was actually flirting with those ideas. "First, we had to get rid of the British," he replied. "To do that, you had to mobilize support from the widest possible group and get as big a majority of the population as you could. If you're not going to shoot the British out, you've got to shake them out, and that means you've got to get the majority with you. First, you've got to get power. Then, having got power, you say, 'What's the problem? Have I said these things? If so, let's f . ", orget It. The British understood what Lee was doing; in the nineteen-fifties, when the British routinely imprisoned Chinese leftists, he escaped arrest, because they realized that he would eventually be an ally, and per- haps the only means of forestalling a leftist takeover of Singapore. But the Central Intelligence Agency was not quite so perceptive as the British. In 1960, fearing that Singapore was fall- ing to the Communists, the C.I.A. tried to put the head of Singapore's Internal Security Department on its payroll. The American who made the offer quickly found himself in jail. Then the United States sent a high- ranking official-to this day, Lee won't reveal his name-to offer Lee three million three hundred thousand dol- lars to keep the affair quiet. Lee coun- tered that instead he would take thirty- three million dollars in economic aid for Singapore. He didn't get it. Five years later, when Lee made the story of the bribe public, the State Depart- ment denied it. The Americans di- rected at Lee what from his point of view were probably the two greatest insults possible: first, they treated him as a banana-republic dictator; then they branded him a liar. A furious Lee called reporters into his office and said he would show them incriminating documents and play them incriminat- ing tapes if the State Department didn't admit the truth. The Americans "are not dealing with N go Dinh Diem or Syngman Rhee," Lee told the report- ers. "You do not buy and sell this Government." The State Department thereupon confirmed the charge. "If the British officers in the Special Branch had been as unsophisticated as the C.I.A., I think we would have been forced into the Communist camp," Lee told me. "The C.I.A. didn't really trust the British, because we were running around with the Communists. Obviously, we should have been locked up and disposed of a long time ago. So their conclusion was that the British were inefficient. They wanted to get the jam on us so that they could fix us-believing that we were Commu- nists, I suppose. Why should I take a few million dollars? It's crazy. And then I'm done for." Lee in fact wasted little time moving against Singapore's leftist Chinese when he came to power. (His gov- ernment has never shown much interest in distinguish- ing the non-Communist left from members of the Com- munist Party. In the early nineteen-sixties, many of Lee's political opponents were espous- ing socialism, not Communism, but Lee has never hesitated to use the word "Communist" to brand political dissidents of all varieties.) He jailed Chinese-language newspaper editors, cracked down on strikes by labor unions, and organized work brigades of unem- ployed Chinese youths so that he could reach them before the Communists did. With British help, he engineered a split with the Chinese-speaking radi- cals he had so forcefully supported in the nineteen-fifties. Never one to pay homage to the concept of free-for-all democracy, Lee eXplained to me with characteristic directness what had hap- pened. "We had taken office with the Communists in our midst," he said. "The British skillfully, not so much by words but by their behavior, led these Comm unists to believe that if they could win power constitutionally, by getting a majority in the Legislative Assembly, they would be acceptable as the government, provided they allowed the British bases to stay. They misled the young revolutionaries into believ- ing that they could take power, and the revolutionaries came out to whack us. That brought about a split, an open conflict with the Communists, and on the best possible terms for us. And we won, we carried the day. We never gave them a second chance playing at constitutional games." The key to Lee's strategy was the merger, in 1963, of Singapore into the Malaysian Federation, joining neigh- boring Malaya and the British colo- nies of North Borneo, now called Sabah, and Sarawak, which are on the island of Borneo It was an enormous 47 " , ....) - II I' I '" .- . , '. . . 4J . . 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